A customer paid for Schemity and couldn't activate it. Their machine had internet, but Schemity's activation requests never reached our server. We still don't know why.
They emailed us their device ID. We activated the license on our end and sent back a PowerShell snippet to set it locally. It worked immediately.
That support ticket prompted us to build a permanent offline flow: support issues a token for your device ID, you paste it into the app, and you're good to go: no phone-home needed.
Bonus: it accidentally solved full air-gap activation, which we hadn't originally planned for.
If you've ever paid for a dev tool only to get blocked by your own network, what was the culprit?
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